New premier tears up literary awards

Campbell Newman says the government's move to axe the Premier's Literary Awards was part of a promised cost-cutting drive.

UPDATED

Campbell Newman has scrapped the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, arguing the $244,000 saving was part of the Liberal National Party's promised cost-cutting drive.

The move was not specifically flagged before the state election and has prompted criticism on Twitter this afternoon, with people raising concern it was an ominous sign about the approach the LNP government would take on supporting the arts.

However, a spokeswoman for Mr Newman said the LNP had been “clear in communicating its plan to control government spending” while aiming to return the budget to surplus, revitalise frontline services and lower the cost of living.

“As part of this plan, existing programs will continue to be reviewed to determine if the cost of these initiatives could contribute to this savings strategy,” she said in a written statement.

“In light of this, the Queensland government has decided not to proceed with the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards in 2012 which will save Queensland taxpayers $244,475, not including the cost of resourcing the awards.

“The government would like to acknowledge all the sponsors, judges, stakeholders, entrants and winners for their valued contribution to the program to date.”

The awards last year carried a range of cash prizes, with a $25,000 lure for the top fiction book, $20,000 for an emerging Queensland author, and $20,000 for an unpublished indigenous writer.

Brisbane author John Birmingham, who is also a blogger for brisbanetimes.com.au, said writers of “some pretty good works” had the support of this prize over the years and the decision to axe the initiative was disappointing.

However, he said he suspected Mr Newman would withdraw funding for a lot more programs.

“The politics of this are pretty simple and pretty brutal,” Birmingham told Fairfax Radio 4BC.

“He’s not going to lose many, if any, votes out of getting rid of this prize, and out of slashing the hell out of a lot of arts budgets.

“There’s quite a bit of state money [that] goes into supporting little theatre companies here and there, library programs for writers. People aren’t aware of how much of this stuff goes on and in total it’s not a huge amount of money. It’s really not.

“[However] it makes a big difference to the people who are getting it, obviously, but in terms of the state budget, there’s probably bigger tough cuts that he could make, but they’re much tougher to sell.”

Former premier Anna Bligh last year described the event as “one of the richest and most diverse literary awards programs in Australia and also one of the most anticipated events on the national literary calendar”.

It is not the first time the Premier’s Literary Awards have been in the Queensland LNP’s spotlight.

The LNP last year questioned the short-listing of Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks’s controversial book for the Non-Fiction Book Award, suggesting any prize money may have to be confiscated under proceeds of crime laws.

Ms Bligh hit back at critics of the independent panel’s decision, suggesting the LNP’s then arts spokesman Scott Emerson was trashing free speech and “reducing himself to a book burner”.

“The day that we see premiers intervening in things like literary awards and making themselves self-appointed judges of the artistic merit of those sorts of documents then Queensland takes a step backwards, and it will never happen while I am Premier,” Ms Bligh said in August.

Mr Hicks’s book did not end up winning. Instead, Associate Professor Mark McKenna’s biography of Manning Clarke claimed the $15,000 non-fiction prize.